Friday, 8 February 2013

A suffering God.

Hi guys. God's
sovereignty is a tricky concept. I do not fully understand it. A professor once
asked: If God is omni-powerful and orders all creation, can God be vulnerable
to that creation? Can God be in control of anything at all without constantly
controlling everything? (John Sanders).

In a cell group
context, I can give a hundred and one reasons why there's suffering in this
world in defence of an all-loving, all-powerful and all-knowing Creator. But I
can't wholeheartedly give even one to a person who is innocently suffering with
no apparent reprieve in sight. Just being dead honest.

Victor Frankl, a
survivor of the Holocaust, once said that "if there is meaning in life at
all, then there must be meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part
of life even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot
be complete."

The "meaning
in suffering" is sometimes a deeply inaccessible concept to me. Take Anna
Seddig for example. During WWII, she was carrying her one year old son and they
had nothing to eat. She was also pregnant. Still, she had to breastfeed her
son. For water, she had to let snow melt in her mouth. Then, as they were
hiding, a group of Red Army Russians soldiers found her and told her they have
a place for her and her son to stay.

She followed them
into an air-raid shelter. There was a table in it. That night, one Russian
after another took their turn with her on that table. She described her body as
"gripped with cramps." In her own words, she said, "You feel
repulsion. I can't express it any other way...I can't tell how many men there
were - ten, fifteen? One of them, I remember, also wanted me, but then he said,
"How many comrades have already been here? Put your clothes on!"

It is said that
sometimes it rains on evil men. Sometimes it rains on the righteous. Sometimes
it rains on both. I guess on that tragic night, Anna must have felt the whole
storm of evil raining down on her.

So, God's
sovereignty is the OB markers for my faith. Proverbs reads, "Many are the
plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will
stand." And it continues, "The lot is cast into the lap, but its
every decision is from the Lord." One author wrote, "God moves in
mysterious way. His wonders to perform. He plants His footsteps in the sea and
rides upon the storm...Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan His work in vain.
God is His own interpreter and He will make it plain."

I guess the last
part makes some sense to me. And I stress “some”. God interprets all in His own
signature style, in His own language of profound love and overriding majesty.
Who am I to translate the tragedies of our times to the Creator who had, in His
sovereign will, "allowed" such tragedies to happen? I know neither
the language nor the tools to transcribe the dark, perplexing events of history
to the history maker Himself. So what is plain to Him is sometimes lame to me.

Let me end with the
words of John Piper. He wrote, "...one of the foundation of oppression is
creature-ism, which is judging the Creator by the standard of the creature.
Creature-ism has several applications: (1) me-ism - judging others by the
standard of myself; (2) cultural imperialism - judging other cultures by the
standard of my culture; (3) sexism - judging the other gender by the standard
of my gender; (4) racism - judging the other races by the standard of my race;
(5) ethno-centrism - judging other people groups by the standard of my people
group."

I guess when it
comes to a personal understanding of why things happen the way they happen
under God’s watch, I plead the "fifth amendment", that is, the right
to remain silent and not self-incriminate, or in this case, self-obfuscate. Of
course, with the exception that I will be called to defend my faith (a biblical
mandate no doubt), the balance of my time would be to submit to a plea of theological
agnosticism.

And if it is for any
reason and for any reason at all, it will be this: To know the mind of God, to
embody his omnipresence, and then to hear in every corner of this fallen world the screams and wails of sufferers on
a blow-by-blow account, repeatedly abused
and tormented even as I am writing this, is honestly something that my feeble
heart, my troubled mind and my wretched soul would not be able to take, even
for a second of it; imagine an eternity.

In all that, in all
the tragedies accumulated since the fall of humanity, the cries and the shrieks
of pain indescribable, I guess only someone in His shoe would be sovereignly
able to take it all in and bear it all full. Because, in the end, there is no
greater sufferer than the Sufferer who suffers together with all His sufferers.
Cheers out.